Renkoo vs. Evite
Via ajaxian, here’s yet another example of an existing product that owns the market (evite) being threatened by a site that offers the same product where the only real difference is the interface. See also Google Maps vs. Yahoo, Gmail vs. yahoo, etc.
I was talking to a VC that recently said they had heard from four companies that want to do a “better eviteâ€. That isn’t a high bar (ads in your face all over, not even showing dates in order!) but they have been slow coming.
Renkoo is a contender, and they have a very Ajax rich side to them, implemented with Dojo, and a splash of Comet.
Now that Renkoo is out there as a public beta, give it a twirl. One walk through creating a new invite will show you some very rich work, with forms filling out as you use each section, and then minimizing to get out of your way.
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December 28th, 2006 at 6:14 am
Aaron you should check out Planypus. Planypus helps with casual and democratic planning. (Disclaimer: I am the co-founder) However, we are not a direct competitor to evite which offers a more formal inviting approach whereas we are all about the casual and collaborative planning.
December 28th, 2006 at 10:52 am
Thanks Alex. I’m personally not that interested in social planning per se, but rather in discussing various client side implementations, which is why I blogged about this one. I’ll take a look at Planypus.
December 29th, 2006 at 6:21 am
Aaron, cool not a problem. If you do decide to check it out, would you let me know what you think? Happy New Year. Cheers!
December 31st, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Hey Aaron, I’m the CTO of Renkoo. I would respectfully have to disagree with you that we only differ from Evite in the interface. You can only usefully send an Evite when you know when and where the event will occur, as well as who you want to invite — in other words, an old-fashioned host-guest hub-spoke system. Renkoo was specifically designed for a flat peer group to decide when and where to get together — which is a problem we’ve all had, right? And as you can see from the screenshot, we specifically focus on drinks dates, going out dancing, movie night, shopping trips, game night, and other things you would want to do with your real-life friends — which are event types that Evite is not typically used for.
I certainly hope we differ from Evite in the UI too though. :-) Thanks for the mention!
December 31st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Not to rain on your parade Joyce, but Evite actually does offer the organizer the ability to set up voting betwen choices (click on invitation options and select “Let guests suggest date and time” or “Poll Guests”). While I agree that evite is unacceptable for casual planning, being able to vote on choices set up by an organizer works exactly the same in Evite and Renkoo. It just might be a tad less cumbersome or hidden in Renkoo. Both evite and renkoo support one organizer, a set time and place or a selection of choices, and Evite offers a number of templates for exacty the same things you mentioned (dancing, movie nights, and so on). I agree you’re different, but not for the reasons you cited.
Planypus actually allows any guest to add locations and times to vote on so it doesn’t restrict this only to the ‘organizer’. In fact we don’t have a traditional notion of an organizer since anyone in the group can become one or abandon their duties at any time. That’s how planning works in real life, so that’s how we’ve modeled it.
January 1st, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I seem to have inadvertently provided a battle ground of sorts here.
Yan, Troutgirl, I applaud both your efforts in offering Evite some much needed competition. Please don’t confuse my interest and comments as any sort of comment on your business or its prospects. I’m really only interested in things related to Clientside technologies and developments. Evite’s interface works pretty well, but could use some serious work, and I view the work of upstarts like yourselves as the kind of thing that moves everyone forward.
CNET, where I work, has the same issue; we have revenue models in place that prevent us from moving quickly into things like ajax, but this needs to change. When I see companies challenging an entrenched veteran by offering a more pleasant user experience, I see the kind of competition that CNET needs to consider, too.
Good luck to both of you!